World Bank Opens Development Data
We have blogged about the launch of World Bank Open API, that Phase2 has helped architect and develop, and later we wrote about how it enriched Google search results.
Today World Bank announced another great news surrounding their Open API: World Bank has made a decision that it will offer free access to more than 2,000 financial, busines, health, economic and human development statistics that were mostly only available to paying subscribers.
The importance of this event can not be underestimated. Not only it means an enormous amount of data (200+ indicators, from 200 countries over 50 years) becoming free for all interested parties to crunch, mash-up and visualize, but it also is a strong signal to the Open Data world: if one of the largest owners of valuable data sets, The World Bank, sees benefit in opening its data, all others should consider it too.
To accompany the big announcement World Bank has also launched a beautiful, Drupal-driven, user-friendly web-site that visualizes API data in many interesting ways: http://data.worldbank.org. You should read more about the data.worldbank.org in a blog post by our friends at Development Seed, the company that lead the effort behind the new Drupal site.
Comments
Is the Data from World bank is Frequently changable
I have to do a project with world economic data for the purpose of analyzing the historical data.is there any website which is having more data other than world bank or the world bank is the one which having the large amount of economic data?.i just want to know about the update process of the world bank data (daily updated or occasionally updated). and i need the entire database in my server for that i need the mechanism to retrieve the whole data frequently whenever it updated by the world bank. help me if anyone have answer for my questions.
kind regards,
suresh
Update frequency depends on
Update frequency depends on the data type. You can contact the World Bank directly for a more specific answer, but from what I understand: some datasets are updated monthly, some semi-annually, some annually. No economic data is ever updated daily. It's different from news, in that gathering and analyzing such data takes significant amount of time.
I believe you can only use data through the API. I doubt any data-provider, of this kind, would just give you a database dump. Besides using data through the official API is the only way to make sure you are always using the latest possible dataset.
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